Title
Relational reasoning via probabilistic coupling
Abstract
Probabilistic coupling is a powerful tool for analyzing pairs of probabilistic processes. Roughly, coupling two processes requires finding an appropriate witness process that models both processes in the same probability space. Couplings are powerful tools proving properties about the relation between two processes, include reasoning about convergence of distributions and stochastic dominance--a probabilistic version of a monotonicity property. While the mathematical definition of coupling looks rather complex and cumbersome to manipulate, we show that the relational program logic pRHL--the logic underlying the EasyCrypt cryptographic proof assistant--already internalizes a generalization of probabilistic coupling. With this insight, constructing couplings is no harder than constructing logical proofs. We demonstrate how to express and verify classic examples of couplings in pRHL, and we mechanically verify several couplings in EasyCrypt.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1007/978-3-662-48899-7_27
LPAR
Field
DocType
Volume
Convergence (routing),Discrete mathematics,Monotonic function,Fair coin,Coupling,Computer science,Cryptography,Algorithm,Theoretical computer science,Mathematical proof,Probabilistic logic,Proof assistant
Journal
abs/1509.03476
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0302-9743
9
0.49
References 
Authors
5
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Gilles Barthe12337152.36
Thomas Espitau2499.18
Benjamin Grégoire381748.93
Justin Hsu436424.38
Léo Stefanesco591.16
Pierre-Yves Strub654029.87